New York's Lovely Abandoned Subway Station

In his new book, Straphanger, Taras Grescoe writes of an abandoned "ghost station" beneath City Hall in New York. Grescoe gets a privileged tour of the station on a promise not to reveal which train still passes along its tracks to this day. While we applaud Grescoe's journalistic integrity, this particular transit secret isn't much of one: it's rather well known that the downtown local 6 train circles the phantom station after the Brooklyn Bridge stop before emerging at the uptown platform.

The forgotten City Hall station was the original terminal of New York's subway system. It opened on the evening of October 27, 1904, along with 27 other Interborough Rapid Transit (I.R.T.) stations up to 145th Street on the west side. The inauguration began with a private ride conducted by Mayor George McClellan and ended with a fascinated public standing in awe of the strange new technology. Here's Clifton Hood's description from his 1993 book 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (via Forgotten NY):